Complex projective surfaces and infinite groups

Abstract

The paper contains a general construction which produces new examples of non simply-connected smooth projective surfaces. We analyze the resulting surfaces and their fundamental groups. Many of these fundamental groups are expected to be non-residually finite. Using the construction we also suggest a series of potential counterexamples to the Shafarevich conjecture which claims that the universal covering of smooth projective variety is holomorphically convex. The examples are only potential since they depend on group theoretic questions, which we formulate, but we do not know how to answer. At the end we formulate an arithmetic version of the Shafarevich conjecture.